


Last Winter

by Rogue_Disciple



Category: Original Work
Genre: Depression, Suicide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-25
Updated: 2017-11-25
Packaged: 2019-02-06 11:24:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,941
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12816483
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rogue_Disciple/pseuds/Rogue_Disciple
Summary: When plans go right who can complain?





	Last Winter

The snow crunches like its got a grudge. She's got one against the world. It took long enough, the waiting part. Waiting for the cold to come and frost the lake over, for the world to freeze. For herself to freeze, actually. Waiting for that winter and it finally came. Then she had to wait for the hour to be just right. 5:00 AM. The hour doesn't suit her well, AM or PM. An awkward hour in which no one ever makes a plan in. Had to keep track of the box too. When she prayed the previous night she'd find it, she half expected it not to be answered, not with what she was going to do with it. She found it in a khaki colored bag in the basement, not even trying to hide. It contained the essentials. She took what she needed out of it. She shined that ugly powerful white light down the bore and saw the finesse the machine crafted that rifling with. Beautiful. Killing machines can be too, don't let anyone say otherwise. She's an artist, after all. She sees beauty in everything even when it looks back at her ugly.  
Everything except the act of living that is. Hence her sojourn.  
She'd has this planned for years. Different place, same method. Wait for winter, for the waters to go cold -water is essential- wait for the small hours of the morning. Preferably it'd be snowing or there'd been a big snow, more muffled that way. 

Gotta have a gun. 

The tramadol was a bonus. It won't hurt as bad, or she won't be as scared. Only half a pill even now. Why, she doesn't ask, because half is good enough. She's going to town her own way, she'll walk the rest.

Afraid she'll wake the neighbors, she moves slowly. It's out of the ways, the dock. There's a few facing south, but that's too close to the houses on the lake. There's a guy who lives there who she's seen once. He'll hear it for sure even if she does take the west dock, the little one no one uses. There's a very small clearing she's in now, pristine snow. She used to love the stuff as a kid, play in it for hours back when she was half polar bear. There's going to be a trail incriminating her from the house to the dock. Where'd she go, just follow that trail. Of course the snow plow's gonna mess part of that up, but cops ain't stupid. The moon is out, which is good, because she really doesn't want to have to turn the flashlight on to do this. She can flick the safety easily in the light. No point in taking a nibble before the main course. 

Damn, she's psyched. She's been psyched since the 23rd of November, when she finally had it. Had the reason for going, mind. She's been looking for a reason for years, _years_. She'd thought a few days prior to that how a gun wasn't so scary, how really, it _is_ that easy to turn it on you and deep-throat it. You pull slowly, bam! Done. Just make sure it's flush with the roof of your mouth. She's sitting on that snowed over dock, the moon way up there like a spot light. She's wearing red but it's black in the dark. Her breath comes out like a dragon's once the scarf is pulled down. 

The idea: shoot yourself in the mouth, fall backwards (she hopes) into the water and if the bullet didn't take care of you hopefully drowning will. Drowning isn't a nice way to go. In fact she'd rather she'd be burned to death. You don't feel anything. You just wait until your lungs fill up with smoke and water and you pass out. Drowning can take some time. A bullet lodged somewhere in there isn't going to make fighting the water easy. In fact it's a downright stupid plan, but she can't think of a better one. Exit bags are too expensive and you really could fuck that up badly. She'd rather try what the men try, a gun. She pokes the ice with her stick to make sure it's got some give. She brought it for two reasons one practical and one paranoid, which in hindsight she's laughing at herself about. Who's gonna try and stop her when she has the gun? 

She takes a good look around her. This is the last thing she's going to know, this frozen lake with the sparse trees, that dead one right there, those boats propped up out of the water, those huge menacingly dark houses. The sky, how it seems solid between the tree branches. If she was going to climb them and reach out she'd touch the sky between the tines. The world is a disused snow globe and she's going to smash the glass getting out of it. The people aren't going to appreciate this. She really hopes she'll fall backwards. Won't give her much time to die without interference, but it will delay them if they come out looking. It will look like she'd made a little nest at the end of the dock before jumping. Only of course there's going to be blood and brain matter in a nice radiant halo around the dark pool where she'll disappear. Like an exclamation point without a sentence. Wasn't that her whole life?

She can't stop herself. Once she'd picked up that gun and put it in her mouth unloaded. She broke down on the bed when she pulled the trigger, sobbed. She'd like to compare it to something poetic, but she was always shit at poetry. Sometimes things are just what they are. 

Another time she'd found the box again (different house) and when she held the gun a voice came out of nowhere. “This life is yours,” it said. Where the hell it came from she doesn't know, but she'd like it to come back now. 

Say something, say anything.

It's probably her hind-brain. Or maybe her soul. Or it could be that homunculi are real and the little her piloting the body around like a Jaeger doesn't want to go just yet. Maybe it likes to watch her suffer. 

She pulls out the pistol from her coat pocket. She decided not to take the box. She unpockets the clip from the other side, jams the clip into the slot, checks the safety. Ok, a little more time. Fuck me, because her brain really doesn't want to go without a review. They parade before her. Her family. Her pets. Her friends. They won't know, will they, what will happen if she can't do this. There's some memories from her childhood, happier times -in hindsight- that just look dull now. The little her, her soul, whatever, played these all out before. You can only watch a movie so many times before you get bored, even if you claim to like it. What if they wake up? She'd been careful. Turned off her light in her bedroom, kept the white noise CD on. Left the backdoor unlocked. Now unless someone takes the dog out and locks it she won't have to go though the garage and wake up her brother or whoever. If she comes back they won't get it. They won't know that yes, timid little her actually got up at 5:00 AM and walked out the door with a fucking gun, sat on a dock in the middle of winter and jammed a damn clip into their pistol and fingered the safety. Breath. Breath it all in, that frozen earth-and-water air. The whole world is frozen. Yes all of it. The tropics don't exist and neither do the deserts. The world is frozen and she's going to die in the winter of 2017 so that to her, it will always be frozen. The winter of her life in her 20s. Better to get it over with. She breaths and steam escapes into the atmosphere. 

She didn't bring her phone. Someone's going to call it sooner or later when hey, did she wake up yet oh no she's not in her room. They won't bother to look at the place besides her bed on the floor where she keeps it, because she knows everyone but her sister would forget that. She doesn't know the time, only that she'd better hurry because someone is going to wake up in one of those houses. She chose Friday so that less people would be interfere if they had work. Doesn't guarantee anything, but she tried. 

Yes she's trying and she's done a good job so far. A few more steps. This is like a manual you follow. You get a gun, you get a spot, better make damn sure you have ammo you loser. You know where to put the gun.

She flips up the safety. She grips the slide and pulls. There was a time that was hard to to. She wasn't strong enough. It's loud. 

It's so quiet. The snow does that. It steals all the color out of the world and makes you deaf and cold. It's like her on the inside. It's pretty though, she'll give it that. 

“Ok, voice, where are you?”

She wonders if she's upset it, whoever it is. Maybe it's bored too. If she were to get her corpus callosum snipped down the middle would the Voice be that alien hand that does things without your permission? It'd be a pain, she thinks, if she managed to lobotomize herself by accident and that Left Hand Voice turns out to be a dictatorial nanny. What if her sense of agency is the Voice, but she's just been the Left Hand this whole time? 

Hell, that'd explain a lot. 

Doesn't matter now. The Voice is silent and she's quite aware and in control of what she's doing. 

Her own voice comes out small and wet and clawing up her throat. Ain't nobody there and it's a bit more than foolish looking to talk to yourself.

“You ready, Arlyn? You really ready you fuck up?” 

“This is it. This is it. This is it...”

“Ok.” 

Nada. No voice. 

She's going to die. She's actually going to die. 

She thinks she's died once. Her acid reflux, when her throat was so swollen it closed up. Everything was inlaid like a cameo in reverse. Everything was just _not there_. It was like the blind spot she'd had a few times when she'd had an aura. There was just nothing. It can't be that bad, it will just be different. It will take some getting used to. It will be like permanent meditation. It's not that bad, she's done it before. 

Boring as hell, but if that's hell she'll take it.

Alright, gun's in mouth, flush with the roof, pointed back at the medulla, the brain stem. Damn it's cold. It's all cold. She can't pull it out. She does that and it flops around like a phallus in her hand and she cries rape and runs home. She stays silent forever and ever and no one will know the consequence. They'd go on thinking she was lying all those times she said she wanted to die. 

People need the truth. It hurts. She's had to live it her whole life. 

She leans back so that the kinetic energy will knock her back into the ice. It's just the right thickness to break under her. 

She pulls back on the trigger nice and slow like they teach you.

Oh shit.

Oh shit.


End file.
